The Decemberists – The Paramount, Nov. 17

Earlier this month, The Decemberists played the Paramount. Colin was sick and couldn’t hit the high end of his range. It seems bad form to critique the show that being the case, so instead I’ll try to convince you of an impossible thing.

The Decemberists, despite what others might tell you, is not the best band in the world. That honor, of course, goes to the Muscle Shoals Studio Band. The Decemberists have not changed the world, nor are they about to. They haven’t even radically altered their sound over the course of four albums, two EPs, and two tour-only releases.

So why should you give them any kind of attention?

Instead of thinking in terms of best or greatest, those ever-standard superlatives, perhaps this time you can use smart and traditional or progressive and eccentric. Think of them in terms of people and not rock Gods, fresh on this sullied soil like invincible aliens from on high, for that is not the Decemberists.

It’s not any other band, for that matter, but that rarely seems germane when discussing the life-changing lifeforce that is MUSIC! We all have bands we want to believe in, and some of those bands want to believe the hype as much as you do.

The Decemberists is not a band that will stun you with guitar pyrotechnics (or any pyrotechnics for that matter), nor will their videos feature Hollywood starlets or fancy CGI.

This is simply a band that writes and performs good songs. Which, as naïve and simple as it may be, is not necessarily a common thing from a band anymore. This is a band that views the album as a cohesive statement, a collection of corollaries, meant to build on each other, build off of each other, so that by the time the needle gently rocks against the spindle, you’ve experienced something. The last time I can remember an album being pushed as an irreducible whole was Radiohead’s OK Computer, and they don’t even have a label anymore.

The Crane Wife is the Decemberists’ major label debut. Here’s a band that draws from Victorian tropes, Heinrich Hoffman lullabies, and the kinds of star-crossed romance on which Shakespeare made bank, releasing records on the same label as Snoop Dogg, OK Go, The Vines, and Yellowcard. And while I loves me some Snoop Dogg, I can’t think of one album he’s released that seemed cohesive–at least after the smoke wore off.

But even that argument doesn’t really get to the point. Lots of artists make great albums on major labels, and most will never see the kind of attention the Decemberists do.

The reason is vision. Ever since the band capped Castaways & Cut-outs, their 2001 debut, with the nearly ten minute “California One/Youth And Beauty Brigade”, the band has been pursuing the epic sound naturally hidden in those pointed little ditties Colin Meloy is always penning.

So it should hardly come as a surprise that the second song on The Crane Wife is a 12 minute long re-working of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. That rocks. Rocks quite hard. Instead of cowering under Capital’s long shadow, they have instead availed themselves of the cash influx and made a rock record like only the 70′s used to be able to. And here’s the key part: there is nothing radically different in the sound.

Yes, the line-up has changed, their notoriety has grown, but the music they were making five years ago hasn’t undergone a change. It has always had the ability to carry these grandiose themes and stylings. It has always been catchy, understated and sublime. The Crane Wife isn’t amazing because a lot of people have heard about them and the press is following suit; it’s astounding because despite the ever-increasing attention, The Decemberists balanced their artistic desires against the commercial reality, shrugged, continued to make the albums they want to make, and became wildly successful.

Name me any artist who has been able to do that, and you’ll be naming greats. The Decemberists may not be great, but they’re really f-ing good.